Wednesday, March 16, 2011

I am pleased to announce that the Blackmarsh sandbox fantasy setting will be included in the Delving Deeper boxed set by Brave Halfling Publishing. It will be a 20 to 24 page supplement detailing the region of Blackmarsh and its locale. It will include a 8.5 by 11 map of Blackmarsh, a half page map of the town of Castle Blackmarsh, an essay on managing sandbox fantasy campaigns, a short history, and a fleshed out list of locales, The locales are described in one or two paragraphs with only the level, class, or HD noted for the NPCs and creatures.

The text and maps of Blackmarsh will be released under the Open Game License allowing anybody to freely publish supplemental material for the setting. The setting shares the same loose background with the other Points of Light setting. It is designed to adjoin the Southland setting. Blackmarsh is to the north of Southland. For those with the Points of Light books, it is set in the same "time period" as Southland.

I consider my work on sandbox setting my most original contribution to the hobby. Until the Necromancer team and myself worked on the Wilderlands boxed set it received little attention or interest. Since then I been able to write a number of well received projects, Points of Light, How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox, etc.

since then, I am always looking for opportunities to get more sandbox fantasy material out there. When John Adam announced his boxed set I sent him an email and we quickly came to an agreement to include Blackmarsh in the boxed set. I really excited about this as I think it will help people get up and running with Delving Deeper quickly. Of course since Delving Deeper is built on the original 1974 roleplaying game, Blackmarsh will work with Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, OSRIC, and many other retro-clones.

When the three volume softcover series is released, I will release the PDF of Blackmarsh for free. Also I will release a plain word document of Blackmarsh. Along with this I will offer for sale a standalone print copy of Blackmarsh.

Currently the project is the midst of being edited and proofed, see the series of editing post by Tim of Gothridge Manor. I will post more on Blackmarsh itself tomorrow.

I'd just like to say, that I deeply appreciate your contributions to the "Sandbox" style of sourcebook / gaming material.

While I do enjoy story-oriented styles of gaming as well, I just felt a weird sense of a gap (not even a name that wasn't derogatory) for that style of setting / game preparation, much less a sense of validity (except for a gut feeling) to it.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.